[Image: Sound Art by Alan Licht] American Quarterly: Special Issue on Sound; Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, Guest Editors :: Call for Papers — Deadline: August 1, 2010.

The field of American studies has long been a familiar home to scholars interested in the social and cultural worlds of sound. Yet while visual culture has had a more visible presence on the pages of American Quarterly, sound has been heard in sporadic bursts, forceful whispers, and sudden critical noises. We propose a special issue of American Quarterly that highlights the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies.

While the study of sound has gained momentum in the last three decades across a variety of disciplines, much remains to be gleaned from a rigorously interdisciplinary focus on sound in its cultural, political, technological, economic, socio-historical, spatial, temporal, affective, and formal contexts. Continue reading

The Emotion Organ by Amanda Steggell — Curated by Michelle Teran :: June 12 – July 10, 2010 :: Opening Reception: June 17; 7:00 – 9:00 pm (Live Performances by Eve Egoyan, Gordon Monahan, Martin Arnold and Toddler Body) :: Women’s Art Resource Centre (WARC), 401 Richmond St. Suite #122, Toronto, ON. Presented in conjunction with the Independent Media Arts Conference and Festival: ON.Fire .

Why would anyone want to merely bang out music, when you could have euphoria? Why be satisfied with an ordinary spinet when you could have The Emotion Organ? Developed over a rigorous three-year period in a small studio in Norway, Amanda Steggell’s The Emotion Organ is a synaesthetic, simulacrum machine that takes its public on a phenomenological journey through the physical senses. With the organ, you can hear colors and smell sounds. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Moments of Inertia by R. Luke DuBois, with Todd Reynolds:

Moments of Inertia is an evening-length performance based on a teleological study of gesture in musical performance and how it relates to gesture in intimate social interaction. The work is written for solo violin with real-time computer accompaniment and video. Moments consists of twelve violin études written for Todd Reynolds – ranging from 1-10 minutes in length – each of which uses a different violin performance gesture as a control input for manipulating a short piece of high-speed film (300 frames-per-second) – of objects and people in motion. Taking its cue from principles in physics that determine an object’s resistance to change, the violinist’s gestures time-remap and scrub the video clip to explore the intricacies of the performed action. Continue reading

Turbulence.org Presents Two World-Premiers at Issue Project Room: The Occupants by Stephan Moore + Moments of Inertia by R. Luke Dubois, with Todd Reynolds :: April 9, 2010; 8:00 pm :: Issue Project Room, At the Old American Can Factory, 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY :: Admission: $10 — Tickets.

The Occupants — by Stephan Moore — is a generative composition with some aspects that can be influenced through single- or multi-user interaction. Moore has used the piece to search for answers to both profound and insipid questions, such as: What does it mean to compose a “site-specific” composition when the site is the internet? Can a generative algorithm be imparted with a sense of long-term form that is also not pre-determined? How successfully can humans be programmed to be good collaborators with software algorithms, towards the latters’ goals? Continue reading

IEEE International SocialCom-09 Conference :: August 29, 2009 :: Vancouver, Canada :: Social Behavior in Music: Final Call for Papers — Deadline: May 17, 2009.

Music making and listening are a clear example of human activities that are above all interactive and social. On the one hand, however, nowadays mediated music making and listening is usually still a passive, non-interactive, non-context sensitive, and non-social experience. The current electronic technologies have not yet been able to support and promote these essential aspects. Continue reading

Table Talk by Brandon LaBelle :: January 25, 2009; 5:00 pm (CET) :: Sound Installation: Tonspur-Passage, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna :: On Air: Ö1 Kunstradio in 5.1, January 25, 2009; 11:03 -11:45 pm (CET) :: Introduction by Georg Weckwerth and Elisabeth Zimmermann.

The dinner party acts as a performative event putting into play social difference, collective sharing, and embodied expressions all shaped and contoured by the flow of food and drink. The time of the meal then is a point of contact weaving individuality into a fluctuating mesh finding form in the presentation of the table, and the meetings taking place there. The table then is a kind of stage, and the passing of words and actions a loose script enacted amidst the ingestion of food and the subtle frictions that place the body in particular roles. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Bronx Rhymes by Claudia Bernett and Maria Ioveva: Bronx Rhymes illuminates the history and significance of Hip Hop in the Bronx by tagging important locations for Hip Hop (1520 Sedgwick, for example) with posters. Each poster describes the historical significance of that location in the form of a rhyme, and invites people walking by to join in a rhyming battle by txt-ing their own rhyme from their mobile phone. The website displays the artists and locations along with all the submitted rhymes elevating the most recent submission. Eventually, visitors to the website will be able to rate existing rhymes, and add their own. Continue reading

CCRMA Concert Series presents The HUB – THE ORIGINAL COMPUTER NETWORK BAND :: October 17, 2008; 8:00 pm :: The Knoll, 660 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA.

THE HUB is a computer music band whose members are all designers and builders of their own hardware and software instruments. The group electronically coordinates the activity of their individual systems through a central micro-computer, The Hub itself, as well as manually through ears, eyes, and hands. The Original Computer Network Band in the San Francisco Bay Area consists of John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Mark Trayle and Phil Stone. Continue reading

Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art – A two-day festival and symposium :: March 28-29, 2008 :: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ :: Free and open to the public.

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus. Continue reading

Just Play – Musik as Social Praxis :: Artists: Cory Arcangel / Beige, Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Kristin Lucas, Hadley + Maxwell, Elke Marhöfer / Anne-Marie Schleiner, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Abe Linkoln / Marisa Olson :: March 8 – May 18, 2008 :: Opening: March 7, 2008; 7 pm :: Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Katharinenstra_e 23, D-26121 Oldenburg.

Music plays a pivotal role in many people’s lives as part of everyday popular culture because it is so unmediated. At times as a real world, at others as a reflecting surface for one’s own and others’ projections, music provides scope for manifold liberating, activist or subversive strategies at a far remove from consumption or glamour. Continue reading